LDS Assumptions | Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead, and Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

The only major LDS science-fiction writer, Orson Scott Card recently won the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America for Ender’s Game (1985) and nominations for the Hugo Award. Speaker for the Dead has already been nominated for the 1986 Nebula.

This recognition is important because Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Game show Card as an intensely LDS writer, but at the level of assumption rather than assertion. While his themes express deeply held LDS beliefs, his novels do not intrude those beliefs upon readers. Instead, readers following Ender Wiggin thousands of years into the future will perceive fundamental questions of human salvation and redemption as analogues to gospel principles.

Ender’s Game and Speaker demonstrate Card’s mastery. Elements criticized in earlier novels—violence and destructive sexuality, for example—draw less attention because they are inherent in the novels’ purposes. Ender kills, but only to save an alien race and his own humanity and to complete the cycle of awareness, guilt, and redemption. His extraordinary talent isolates him from humanity in Ender’s Game; in Speaker, he works pain fully back into the community of ramen (sentient beings). 

Card balances action with thought, science fiction with archetype, science with faith. The novels explore religion as subject and religious individuals as characters yet avoid polemics or stereotypes; the Christ-figure, for example, must stand at the foot of an alien cross to crucify another savior. Such inversions are so carefully paced that Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead succeed equally as SF adventure and as analogical explorations of humanity, morality, salvation, and redemption. LDS readers will find much that is thought provoking, stimulating, and spiritually moving in both novels. 

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (New York: Tor Books, 1986), 415 pp. $15.95 hardcover; Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (New York: Tor Books, 1986), 357 pp. $3.50 paperback (rpt. of 1985 Tor hard cover original).